If it is true that we are at the beginning of a new season, then what is most important for us to understand is how to approach and how to take part in that season, what role we want to play in it and above all whether we want to determine it, even only partly, or be subjected to it. This thinking concerns us from at least two points of view: one that concerns every one of us as individuals, and the other collectively, due to the craft, the profession that we practise as part of a community. Let us start then from this second point of view, the one that sees us as part of a collectivity determined by our work and by the surroundings and issues stemming from it.
We are talking here about the architect’s job, a job that can be done only by those regularly enrolled in this association, a job regulated by a set of civilised rules and professional ethics to be respected. We are talking therefore simply about a job, one of the many done by men and women.
A person does not become an architect because he has passed a certain number of exams at a school
When you come to think of it however, considering all this and the large numbers of people rotating around architecture, not only is there no lively and frank debate to animate the discipline today, as ought to be expected, but there is not even an authoritativeness of our excellence to match our numbers, and ultimately not even a big enough turnover to justify all this. Our architecture schools, with the means at their disposal, are managing today to deliver an averagely good training, even compared to what happens in the rest of the world. But we should start by answering the question: Good compared to what?
To do that however, we need first of all to answer another question: What task should be performed by a school, and by a state-run school in particular, in the training of a future architect? That of teaching a craft, training the future professional, making excellence possible? None of these tasks is actually carried out by our architectural training facilities, but then why should they be anyway? After all, these are certainly not the duties of a school.
A craft, of course, is not learnt at school, but as we well know, only by practising it. And that goes for professional training too, which requires highly specialised studies and skills. And finally, the forming of excellence requires some very sophisticated and appropriate teaching structures. So what sort of training do Italian schools offer their students?
Wanting to link them to a common goal, we can say that they do impart a university-level, hence generally higher form of education. It is a kind of education aimed chiefly to augment the students’ cognitive relation to their discipline, so that once they have finished their studies, they can properly tackle and solve the problems to be faced in their future work. In the last analysis, this means that our schools of architecture should primarily be concerned with the forma mentis of their students, in the awareness that the true architect is not a technician, not a specialist. On the contrary, he is a person with the capacity to pick the right technician or the most competent specialist to help him best fulfil his work.
Architects should go back to being architects, innovating while prioritising humanity over clients
The result of this work has no longer been, for too long and for too many architects, the touchstone by which to judge one’s own and other people’s capacities. In this way the architect’s work has lost authoritativeness, and the architects themselves have no longer thought of it as something to be proud of. And so they have strayed farther and farther from their objectives: to succeed by their efforts in giving people better lives. We have thus lost the capacity to recognise the quality of a work and the extraordinary gifts that it may possess and transmit to us when it is genuine and innovative; we no longer recognise how its unexpected and surprising results can arouse wonder.
We have ceased to judge our work as architects for what it produces and achieves, or even for what it prefigures through its design. In a word, we have too often avoided the issue and been content, perhaps in good faith, even with partial or lesser results, which may perhaps have seemed momentarily rewarding and left our consciences clear. But in reality they did not advance our discipline by as much as a single inch. But all this by now can be left behind, overtaken by events and already part of the past. It will very soon all be forgotten.
In the face of this reborn awareness of what needs to be done to renew the designing and governance of our houses and neighbourhoods, cities and land, all the places of our private and public life, architects still seem to be missing, continuing to apply old and obsolete methods in their work. They are not listening, and above all, they are failing to give form to the new demands and needs, to the new requests and also to the new dreams of our times.
If until a short while ago architects could, and rightly, complain of the lack of a context or of the absence of a question to be answered with their own efforts, today there are all the symptoms of a striking change. Of course it takes determination, patience and time to seek them, because they are not yet solid and consolidated, but they are already undoubtedly and irreversibly there. For this reason it is up to architects now to seize this new situation and turn it into forms to fit it, forms that can be shared and convincing. And they must do so before others appropriate the same terms in favour of yet another ideology or ism, after which it will be too late.